24th Patmos Festival of Religious Music featuring ‘Fiery Addresses’
Three evenings of music and spiritual exploration, from Bach and Beethoven to Elytis and Byzantine hymns
Entitled ‘Fiery Addresses’, the 24th Patmos Festival of Religious Music will take place from 2 to 4 September 2026 at the Skala Primary School, with free admission. This year’s event, under the artistic direction of Titos Gouvelis, presents three different approaches to the relationship between music and spirituality.
The opening, on Wednesday 2 September at 8.30 pm, will feature the concert ‘From Silence to Light’. The Athens String Quartet presents a programme linking Arvo Pärt’s *Fratres* with Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15, Op. 132, creating an internal dialogue centred on silence, faith and the human quest.
On Thursday 3 September, the ‘The Two Worlds’ evening brings music and poetry together. Alexandra Papastefanou on the piano and Ioulita Iliopoulou reciting combine works by Johann Sebastian Bach with the poetry of Odysseas Elytis, in an encounter where sound and the spoken word engage with the lyrical and existential dimensions.
The Festival concludes on Friday 4 September with ‘Sounds of Contemplation’. The Byzantine Choir of the Rhodes Music School, conducted by Theocharis Zagoras, will perform troparia from Vespers, Matins and the Divine Liturgy, in a programme dedicated to the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
Three evenings, three different musical languages and a common thread: the search for the spiritual through art.
